I do think that some drill is important in the earlier years to set up a foundation
I don't disagree there. DD knows her facts better and faster than I did at that age, so I don't worry that her recall will hold her back in math. But she's a slow writer and tenses her arm muscles when she tries to write fast, and then her arm hurts. Failing over and over to meet the time cutoff means she stops trying, and concludes either that she's bad at math, or that she dislikes math, neither of which are actually true. She's just bad at (and dislikes) timed drill.
Fortunately, this year's teacher is using a 7-minute cutoff for the occasional subtraction and multiplication drill, and both of those should be achievable with practice. Addition is still 5 minutes, and last year she couldn't write that many digits in 5 minutes, even with no computation involved.
